Bases Chosen

From at least two of its eight new base sites (Newfoundland & Bermuda) last week long-range patrol planes joined the U. S. Navy's patrol force guarding the Atlantic approaches to the U. S. and Canada. Just eleven weeks before the Navy had been promised the new bases from Great Britain in trade for 50 overage destroyers. By last week it was not only using two of them but also had reached agreement with Britain upon the exact sites for U. S. land plane, seaplane and naval bases on all but one of the New World islands and continental areas. The plans:

Newfoundland, 400 miles long, fertile and flat, is rimmed by high (200-ft.) rock walls. For a naval base there, the Navy chose 22 acres on the south side of St. John's Harbor. On landlocked Placentia Bay it took an area of two square miles for an air base and training ground for the U. S. Army.

Air and naval operations off Newfoundland in winter are difficult at best. But from the island, long-range submarines and cruising ships can keep an eye on Greenland, 950 miles away, and patrol the sea lanes from Europe to Montreal, Boston and New York City.

Bermudians went bug-eyed last week at the extent of U. S. defense plans for their island. Not in Great Sound, the harbor of Hamilton, but at the opposite end of the island group were the chief projected U. S. bases: for the Army a plane base on Long Bird Island, for the Navy a seaplane base, naval base and garrison area on St. David's Island, the use of several small islands near by for ammunition storage. From there it can spot a hostile fleet advancing against any North Atlantic port.

Jamaica, 80 miles south of Cuba and 500 miles north of the Panama Canal, is the only new U. S. base squarely within the Caribbean. For big, rugged Jamaica, the U. S. Navy has big plans : an anchorage at Portland Bight, in Galleon Harbor 33 square miles of land base; 100 acres near Williamsfield for a recreation centre and hospital mess ; a mile-square area south of May Pen for an emergency and auxiliary landing field. Near by at Port Royal the British naval dockyard, long neglected, will be improved by the U. S., providing the U. S. Navy with a place to service its warships halfway between the Canal and the Atlantic Coast.

Antigua and St. Lucia, 200 miles apart, will provide stations from which the Navy can patrol the eastern entrances of the Caribbean. At Antigua the Navy will have the use of about three square miles on Parham Sound and also of a site on Crabs Peninsula across the harbor. St. Lucia, 2,600 miles west of Dakar and 1,150 miles from the Canal, will house a 120-acre seaplane base at Gros Islet Bay, and possibly other facilities not yet decided on.

British Guiana is equidistant (1,450 miles) from the Canal and Natal, Brazil, hub port of the South Atlantic. There the U. S. Navy will build two air bases -- a patrol plane squadron base and airdrome 25 miles up the Demerara River, a seaplane base near Suddie.

The Bahamas form a long archipelago, and Mariguana Island, where the Navy will have a base, is 375 miles from Nassau. The exact nature of the base has not been decided. Only at Trinidad, perhaps a major spot in the defense, had no site for a U. S. base been agreed on.

Last week engineers were hard at work in Bermuda (most important of the eight bases), reconditioning and expanding the new U. S. outpost. There, at Newfoundland and at Jamaica a lot of work must be done before base sites become effective bases. The job will take both time and money -- of which money last week seemed to be the more plentiful.

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